Chinese Party Invitation

Last week I received a phone call from a man named “Wallace” (his English name). He told me he was good friends with a foreign teacher who was here last year and was a student at a nearby University. He also wanted to invite me to a party at his university that was celebrating the English language. I agreed to go to the party and asked when the party would be.

He said, “How is Tuesday night?”

I said, “I can’t, I teach on Tuesday.”

Then he said, “But I already wrote your name on all the flyers!”

Flyers? I thought, what kind of party was this going to be?

Decisions

He basically called me about five more times last week until he decided that Friday night we would have the party. I did not want to go on Friday night because I have my Tae Kwon Doe class until nine and I did not want to miss class, but somehow Wallace had convinced me to drop my plans and go—in fact it was a bit annoying how persistent he was. I later found out he had also convinced another foreign teacher to go as well and both of us did not want to go on Friday night but had somehow been cornered into going.

Arrival

So Friday comes along and my friend who is another foreign teacher are really tired because we had just finished teaching our 7-10 year olds at 6:00 and we had finished a long week of teaching. Even though we were tired we headed out in the rain to a far away University to go to this party. When we arrive at the “party” we discovered it was actually a classroom with 3 seats up in the front for the three foreigners who were expected to come. When we entered the room everyone clapped for us, and it said “Just Chat” on the chalkboard behind us. We were told there was a Canadian teacher also scheduled to come.

Chinese Party Becomes English Corner

The “party” turned into a night of “Ask the foreigner questions.” Wallace ran the whole thing and he was really awkward in front of people and the questions were really stupid. What is your favorite food? Do you like the Mamas and the Papas? How many brothers and sisters do you have? This was not a party, it was an English Corner.

They asked us all what other languages we could speak—the teacher from my school said she could speak Spanish, French, and Shauna (a language they speak in Zimbabwe) and the Canadian said he could speak French and German and Italian. So when it was my turn to say what languages I could speak, all of the sudden my knowledge of English, French, and a bit of Chinese seemed very unimpressive. So I said I could also speak a secret language that I invented with my friends. After I said this everyone in the room just kind of stared at me and did not really understand what I was talking about. I think I had said it more to amuse myself. It got to the point where I was just saying things to amuse myself because the night was not very amusing. Then Wallace had everyone speak one of the languages and so they asked me to speak my secret language. I made up some kind of secret language sounding thing, the whole thing was ridiculous.

Then they asked us to act out our favorite movies. At this point, I was willing to do anything to make the night more fun and so the teacher from my school and I just started acting out scenes from movies that we know most Chinese students have seen, like Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Spider Man, Noting Hill, Rush Hour, and others. The Canadian teacher refused to get involved in our craziness and before you knew it I was slapping the other teacher after she told me she was going to marry Melanie, then we were putting our arms out and saying, “I am the King of the World,” then she picked me up and saved me from burning buildings.

Now you have to imagine all these quiet students who spend their free time playing computer games, who had gathered on a Friday night to meet the foreigners, and they come to see us acting out love scenes and fight scenes from movies. In between there would be breaks where the students would get up and sing “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic or a song by Savage Garden or something. Then they asked us to sing and dance. So we had everyone standing up doing the Macarena. The Macarena has become our “fall back” when we don’t know what else to do. This kind of stuff happens all the time and sometimes you are just too tired to be asked to sing another song in front of more people so you just teach the Macarena, which is always really popular because they do not know it for some odd reason and it is easier to do.

Cool Enough

Anyway, after the night was over Wallace followed us home and would not leave. He asked me if he was “cool enough” to be my friend and he wanted to know if I could do this every week.

So, if anyone thinks that they want to be a part of this fun—come on over and teach here! They will probably get tired of us after awhile.